Supermassive black hole seeds from direct collapse of CDM-curvature peaks

Abstract

We study black hole (BH) formation from the nonlinear growth and collapse of primordial perturbations during the matter-dominated era. Modelling cold dark matter (CDM) as pressureless dust, we describe the collapse in a fully nonlinear relativistic framework using the Lemaître-Tolman-Bondi (LTB) and quasi-spherical Szekeres solutions as exact perturbations of a spatially-flat Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) $Λ$CDM background. At first order in relativistic scalar perturbation theory, the growing mode of any relevant quantity can be expressed in terms of the conserved gauge-invariant curvature perturbation $\mathcal{R}_c$, which acts as a potential for the 3-curvature of hypersurfaces orthogonal to the matter 4-velocity. We use this result to express the active gravitational mass and curvature functions of the LTB and Szekeres models in terms of the initial values of $\mathcal{R}_c$ and its spatial derivatives. From these initial curvature data we derive: (i) the turn-around, collapse, and apparent-horizon formation times, and (ii) the regularity conditions required for BH formation. We show that sinusoidal and Gaussian profiles do not provide viable BH-forming channels, whereas broad compensated curvature peaks, naturally predicted by peak theory, do. We then estimate the formation times of $10^{3}-10^{6}~\mathrm{M}_\odot$ massive BH seeds produced by the direct collapse of primordial CDM curvature peaks, finding full BH formation at redshifts $z>5$, with core collapse beginning at $10 \lesssim z \lesssim 16$. Finally, we characterize the local dynamics and singularity type of the collapse (point-like, cigar-like, or pancake-like) directly from the initial comoving curvature data, clarifying the role of the initial shear in selecting the collapse end-state.